The proliferation of cloud based services and platforms continues to increase. Specifically, cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate information are stored, and has also impacted the way personal and corporate information are shared and managed. One benefit of using a cloud based service (e.g., content storage service) is access to content from anywhere and from any device through a web browser. However, web browser applications and common user device displays can be limited in their ability to display high resolution images. For example, a digital representation of a clinical pathology slide can have a native image size of 40,000 pixels by 40,000 pixels, corresponding to an image file requiring over one gigabyte (GB) of storage. Such images and associated image files consume significant computing and communication resources when transferred (e.g., from a cloud based storage service to the browser), and are often too large to be rendered as a single image by the browser. These limitations are exacerbated as users (e.g., researchers) of such images desire to quickly navigate (e.g., pan, zoom, etc.) the images.
One legacy approach for displaying subject high resolution images (e.g., medical images) involves storing the high resolution images using dedicated proprietary storage databases. Such an approach, however, requires costly on-premises hardware infrastructure and supporting software (e.g., for viewing the subject image). Moreover, such dedicated proprietary systems do not include the aforementioned accessibility and collaboration features of a cloud based service. Other legacy approaches pre-render a set of “zoom” images and store the pre-rendered zoom images into a single folder or directory so as to allow retrieval of a subset of the entire image. However, as the size of the subject image to be traversed (e.g., through many zoom levels) increases, so does the number of pre-rendered higher resolution images that are stored in the single folder. Storage of a large number of pre-rendered higher resolution images into the single folder introduces performance bottlenecks that only become worse as the subject images become larger and/or of a higher resolution. Approaches that store many pre-rendered higher resolution images (e.g., many thousands of pre-rendered higher resolution images), in a base folder or directory results in slow file access and retrieval, particularly as users navigate through portions of a subject image.
The problem to be solved is therefore rooted in technological limitations of the legacy approaches. Improved techniques, in particular improved application of technology, are needed to address the problems that arise in a cloud-based storage system when high-density images need to be presented for fast panning and zooming. More specifically, the technologies applied in the aforementioned legacy approaches fail to achieve sought-after capabilities of the herein disclosed techniques for rendering, zooming and panning through high resolution images in a browser. What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve the application and efficacy of various technologies as compared with the application and efficacy of legacy approaches.